Artist Statement

I am Natascha Merveille Bope and I'm a self-taught artist living in Vienna/Austria. My
love for painting sparked at the tender age of five. I remember my excitement about my dad bringing home large packs of paper. I would immediately start drawing funny looking faces. At that time
my equipment consisted of ordinary printing paper, ballpoint pens and pencils.

In elementary school I became best friends with a girl who was just as passionate about
drawing as I was. Her birthday was even at the same date as mine, and we also found out that we had been neighbors for years. Her love for art had a huge impact on me. In my view, she was way
more skilled than I was at that time, which inspired me to get even better. We shared many hours of inspiration and creativity.

Unfortunately, I became very inconsistent with drawing after a while. I was told
that art couldn't assure a livelihood, so I lost sight of it. What followed was a long period of not painting. I would have creative moments here and there, but they were very rare.

Artists like Luis Royo and Victoria Francés
reminded me of the joy I felt whenever I created a new piece of art and this is what brought me back. I am currently focusing on marker and colored pencil paintings, and I am eager to bring on
paper whatever my mind wishes to retain.

I see many of my art pieces in my dreams and then I
try to bring them on paper. Sometimes it's the other way around. My experiences of encountering foreign lands and realities in my dreams, make my art unique. I intend to find strength in these
miraculous scenes of my imagination and my subconscious mind, where the strange becomes the ordinary.

I would feel blessed
if I could pass on, at least some of my inspiration and creativity that surrounds me, and help others to bring back that passion for art, who might have lost it, as I did
once.